Nowadays, a business entity or enterprise is not standalone anymore. Thus, an enterprise does not need to produce everything it needs. As a result, an enterprise can outsource portions of its business to its business partners.
For example, in an engineering design collaboration scenario, many manual or semi-automated operations exist in the design process. Each enterprise participating in the design collaboration needs to work with its logistic service providers and customers to keep its operations running well. An enterprise may typically leverage some well-proven services and products to be part of its daily operation process or a new product design process.
In a new product design, by way of example, the enterprise that is designing products has to work with component suppliers, electronic manufacturing services (EMS) or contract manufacturers to design a product collaboratively. Some component design work may be outsourced to design partners who specialize in fabrication of a special component such as an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), a battery, or a motherboard.
This kind of outsourcing model becomes more and more useful in the information technology (IT) industry and business transformation industry. It is the outsourcing model that enables disaggregated businesses to create more innovative and higher quality products or services than that they would have accomplished on their own.
However, the real technical obstacles to an effective outsourcing model are not the business process representation and data transformation. The real problem is the interactions between two or more loosely coupled business processes, which could be private business processes in their own enterprises or public processes across multiple enterprises.
For example, returning to the above-mentioned engineering design collaboration scenario, there are several manual or semi-automated operations in the product design process. Participants use phone, fax, or email to exchange design specification documents and design files such as electronic and mechanical computer aided design (CAD) files, as well as bill of material (BOM) files. The resulting problem is that it is very hard to get real-time information from the design network, such as information associated with monitoring of the status of on-going projects, tasks and exchanged documents.
Additionally, there are different design systems and product development management (PDM) systems with different formats for design documents and design specifications. Moreover, the traditional workflow only documents the detailed steps of a known process. But for a product innovation, nobody really knows all the details of the design for each individual component. Therefore, it is a non-deterministic workflow that involves multiple collaborators who are specializing in their domain components. Further, many business exceptions need to be addressed during the full life cycle of a product design process.
Furthermore, in current business-to-business (B2B) application scenarios, vast numbers of documents have to be transmitted to receivers in different enterprises. The documents need to be delivered to the proper people with appropriate responses. However, each document can be delivered to any receiver. From the original sender's point of view, he or she may not know who else will be a receiver. Thus, a document delivery channel across multiple enterprises, or even within one organization, forms a non-structural and non-deterministic information exchange flow.
Therefore, as is evident, with the rapid growth of requirements of business process integration, how to efficiently and effectively manage non-structural and non-deterministic information exchange in a uniform way is a challenging issue. More specifically, the following are examples of problems in existing information exchange techniques:
1) Lack of a uniform annotation mechanism that represents the control information separated from the real documents to be exchanged;
2) Lack of a comprehensive collaboration pattern that covers all aspects of a non-structural and non-deterministic information exchange flow;
3) Lack of an efficient on-demand information mechanism that dynamically locates resources from a non-structural relationship graph, as well as intelligently aggregates data from multiple sources; and
4) Lack of a trackable information embedding mechanism for visibility control that addresses key issues associated with data exchange in collaborative environment.
Therefore, a need exists for improved information management techniques for use in applications such as on-demand business collaboration.